The headline numbers
Roughly two-thirds of European research universities now have a formal open-access policy. A smaller fraction have a working deposit mandate. A smaller fraction still have a workflow that catches the deposit at the point an article is accepted, rather than chasing it months later.
Our pipeline harvests OA-status metadata from institutional repositories, CRIS systems and OpenAIRE aggregations. The data below summarises the 2026 Q1 sweep across European universities that share their repository feeds openly.
The deposit gap, explained
The gap between “policy on paper” and “article in repository” is not, in our experience, about author resistance. It is about the workflow not meeting the author where they already are.
Most authors discover the policy when they receive an acceptance email. By then the accepted manuscript is on a hard drive, somewhere; the publisher portal wants a different version; and the institutional repository expects metadata the author does not have memorised. The deposit is technically possible. It is not, in any practical sense, easy.
The deposit gap is a workflow gap, not a will gap. Authors do not need to be persuaded. They need the next click to be the deposit.
From the methodology noteRegional patterns
Northern European institutions lead on green OA — deposits of accepted manuscripts in institutional repositories — in part because their funders (UKRI, NFR, DFF, AKA) have aligned mandates with concrete deposit destinations. Their compliance is high because the path is unambiguous.
Southern European institutions lead on platinum OA — diamond OA journals operated by universities or scholarly societies, free for both author and reader. Italian and Iberian university presses are particularly active here, often running editorial workflows that predate the OA conversation.
Central European institutions tend to be in the middle on both fronts, with strong policy adoption but variable workflow maturity. The transition is real; the deposit rate per active author is climbing year on year.
What changes in 2026
Three things are moving in the next twelve months and the institutions that prepare now will spend less time scrambling later.
- REF 2029 evidence collection opens earlier than expected in the United Kingdom. Institutions are being asked to demonstrate compliance trails per output, not just policy text.
- Plan S transformative agreements reach a hinge point as the original cOAlition S signatories review extensions. Read-and-publish economics that were experimental in 2020 are now line items in subscription budgets.
- EU Open Science Cloud (EOSC) federation expands its identity layer. Institutions that have a real CRIS with reliable author identifiers will find this transition cheap. Institutions still on spreadsheet-CRIS will not.
What we publish, and why
The dataset behind this analysis is anonymised at the institution level and aggregated regionally. We do not name laggards and we do not rank universities. The point is not to embarrass anyone; the point is to make the shape of the deposit gap legible enough that workflow decisions can act on it.
The methodology and the aggregated dataset are published openly each quarter. Editorial conclusions stay editorial — you are welcome to disagree with them while citing the same numbers.
